Congratulations, you made it to the French Open. You get to play Djokovic and Alcaraz.
Aleksandar Kovacevic tossed and turned on Sunday night before finally falling asleep to what he thought was about six hours of restless sleep.
He had good reasons to be nervous. Kovacevic, who is 24 years old and the 114th player in the world, had a tennis date at noon in the first round of the French Open with Novak Djokovic, the winner of 22 Grand Slam singles titles.
The only person with a bigger commission may have been Flavio Cobolli of Italy. Cobolli, ranked 21 and 159th, survived last week’s qualifying tournament, but was rewarded with an opening round showdown with Carlos Alcaraz.
Things didn’t go so well for one of the strangers.
Nine games and about 35 minutes into Cobolli’s match, an Alcaraz forehand sailed long and Cobolli let out a scream, waved his racket in celebration and put a smile on his face. He thrust his fist at the crowd as he walked to his seat. He had finally won a game against the best player in the world, who played like, well, the best player in the world.
“I did my best,” said Cobolli.
Kovacevic, who lost to Djokovic 6-3, 6-2, 7-6(1), also had a pretty good idea of what that felt like, even though he lasted more than two hours on the pitch with a player who he grew up idolizing.
“There were some points, passing shots that he hit, and those are just points where sometimes I feel like I didn’t have a chance,” said Kovacevic. “And those are certainly humiliating.”
It’s a truth like a cow in tennis that the top players hate playing the first round of a Grand Slam. Anything but a cruise to victory is cause for concern. There is also always the possibility of an epic failure in the form of a loss for someone that few have heard of.
Whatever discomfort Djokovic and Alcaraz may have felt walking onto the fields of Roland Garros on Monday, they mostly managed with ease, especially Alcaraz. He made an early contribution to the highlights of the tournament by curling a backhand around the net post for a winner early in the second set. Djokovic had more training and even lost his serve late in his match after getting windblown clay in his eyes.
It helped that the stars attracted opponents with triple digit rankings whose recent experience didn’t have much in common with their own. Kovacevic had a particularly tortuous journey to his French Open center court date with Djokovic.
His father, Milan, immigrated to America from Serbia to earn a doctorate in computer science from UCLA. .
In ninth grade, he still wasn’t good enough to play singles for Beacon High School, a Midtown public school, even though he spent afternoons training at John McEnroe Tennis Academy on Randall’s Island.
Things started to click after he left Beacon to train in Florida while taking classes at home. In a tournament one summer, he played a top junior who planned to attend the University of Illinois. His opponent told him to join his school, and he did, even though he didn’t have much interest in college. By the time he finished five years later, he was in the low 400 and thought he would give pro tennis a shot.
Since then he has mainly played in the tennis hinterland, although he did win a match in the main draw of the prestigious Miami Open in March.
“It was not the most glorious of recent years,” he said.
On Monday, Kovacevic made his Grand Slam debut against Djokovic on Roland Garros main court Philippe Chatrier, although it was not the first time he had met Djokovic.
That happened at the US Open when he was 6 and his Balkan-proud parents brought him to 18-year-old Djokovic who won an early round match long before Djokovic was the player he would become. And two years ago, he warmed up to Djokovic at the US Open after coming close to qualifying to play.
He has the pictures to prove it, and he has tried to incorporate elements of Djokovic’s game into his own. His crouch while waiting for an opponent’s serve – knees wide, chest up, racket in front – has a lot of Djokovic in him, even if the rest of his game isn’t quite there yet.
“Where I’m at in my career, like it shouldn’t be too crazy for me to play against some of these guys,” he said. “But you know, the little kid in me, I’m standing in Chatrier in front of a packed crowd playing the best player to ever pick up a racket. It’s something you have to take in for a while, but also push away and try to focus and play.”
As Alcaraz started his career, eventually he can say something about who is the best player to pick up a racket. Everyone in tennis knows this, including Cobolli, who also spent most of his short career in the sports version of the minor leagues.
He was in an elevator and still feeling good about qualifying for his first Grand Slam match when he checked his phone and saw that his opponent was Alcaraz. He said he closed his eyes, ran his hand through his hair and thought, “Oh no.”
About 45 minutes into the game, things went as he had feared. Alcaraz couldn’t miss and later said he felt “invincible”, like he would never lose a match. Cobolli barely had time to breathe between shots.
The scoreboard said 6-0, 2-0.
“He played unbelievably,” said Cobolli.
On the bright side, there’s nothing the French public loves – except a French player – more than standing behind a player who gets blitzed. And by the time Cobolli got his legs under him and tied the third set at 5-5, the crowd of nearly 10,000 on the Suzanne Lenglen court was chanting his name. It was like he was one of them, especially after saving three match points and breaking Alcaraz’s serve to draw in the set.
“I felt important on the pitch,” said Cobolli.
The final score was 6-0, 6-2, 7-5, the elapsed time 1 hour and 57 minutes.
Now that Cobolli has seen up close what the best looks like, he said he has a better understanding of what he needs to do to compete — go to the weight room, he said with a grin as he pressed his chest with his hand. And get better at tennis.
Hope springs eternally ahead of him, as it does for so many of the Kovacevics and Cobollis in the game. Just over two years ago, Alcaraz’s ranking also consisted of three figures.